Then he pulled back and thrust in again. Leah clamped a hand over her own mouth to keep a yell from escaping. It felt so good.
Jeff was making low, hungry noises as he moved inside her, pressing kisses to her neck, her jaw, her fingers over her mouth. “Leah,” he groaned, and thrust hard inside her, making her clamp down on him in blinding pleasure, then stayed buried deep for a long moment. “Leah, you feel amazing. Like silk. You’re so beautiful, I could stay inside you forever.”
Leah wished he could. The way he felt inside her was more than just physical. They were joined, in a way that made her feel closer to Jeff than she’d ever imagined she could feel with another person.
Then he moved again, and all of her thoughts were carried away on a rush of sensation. She bit down on her fingers to stay quiet, making strangled noises as the intensity built.
Jeff tugged her hand away and kissed her. Leah pulled him in, digging her fingernails into his back. He groaned at the sensation, and thrust harder.
Leah tore her mouth away and gasped as he hit the perfect spot—once—twice—and then she was coming so hard she curled around Jeff’s body, clenching down on his cock as her muscles seized with orgasm.
Jeff kept thrusting, and each movement sent further shocks of pleasure through her. As she clenched down harder, he shuddered, thrust in one last time, and came with a groan.
There was a long, long moment where they stayed exactly where they were, connected as closely as two people could be. Leah could taste Jeff’s sweat on her tongue, feel his heartbeat racing against her chest. Heat came off of him, and his cock softened inside of her. She never wanted to let him go.
Eventually, though, they had to separate. Jeff pulled back slowly, though, with a rain of soft kisses, as though he was just as reluctant as she was to draw away. And once he’d disposed of the condom, he came back and cuddled up to her, pressing up against her back, his arm tucking her close against him.
“Mmmm,” Leah said.
“Sleep,” Jeff murmured in her ear. “I’ll be here.”
And with that, Leah relaxed and slept.
***
Jeff woke up early. He hadn’t slept much, just catnapped throughout the night, waking up whenever Leah moved or sighed.
He was buzzing with awareness of her. He felt like he could sense the shape of her next to him without opening his eyes, like he could feel her sleeping presence.
Jeff knew it for certain: Leah was his mate.
He’d never been sure whether true shifter mates actually existed. His parents weren’t mates, but they were definitely proof that you didn’t need to be mates to fall in love and create a family. They were both disdainful of the idea: People say they’ve got this mystical connection, his father would say, but I think that’s just an excuse to pretend relationships aren’t hard work. You’ve got to buckle down and make a marriage, it doesn’t just fall out of the sky already perfect.
Jeff believed the last part wholeheartedly. After all, even if you did meet your soulmate, they would’ve had a whole life before you. There’d be things you’d have to work out between you no matter what.
But he’d always wondered. If so many shifters said they’d found their mates, they couldn’t be wrong, could they? He’d thought that maybe it
was because his parents weren’t both shifters: his mother was a snow leopard, but his father was human.
Not all his siblings were shifters, either, but the two of them who were leopards had done the same thing his parents had: met humans, fallen in love, and gotten married without any word of a mate-bond. Jeff had started to think that his parents were right. After all, his siblings had happy marriages and beautiful children, so what more did they need?
And then Grey Landin had moved up to start working alongside him at Glacier, and he’d brought his mate Alethia with him. That’s how he’d introduced her: This is my mate, Alethia.
And the two of them had something.
Jeff didn’t know how to explain it. It wasn’t anything he could see, or smell, or touch, but he knew. Grey wasn’t complete without Alethia, and vice versa. They were part of each other.
And Leah was part of him.
He’d known from the second he saw her, fallen to her knees in the snow, that he had to help her, had to stay with her, had to be near her. But he hadn’t realized what that meant until last night, when he’d been deep inside her for the first time and realized, Yes. This is how we’re meant to be. Part of each other. Inside each other.
Now he just had to tell her.
Jeff laughed at himself a little. This was going to be a doozy. How did you tell somebody about shifters? He’d grown up all his life with the understanding that in their tiny ranger community, most everybody knew about shifters.
It wasn’t even like the park was packed with shifters. Glacier was a known snow leopard community, sure, because it was probably the best area of the United States for snow leopards to live. But snow leopard shifters were incredibly rare, so there were still only a couple dozen of them around, counting Jeff’s whole family.
But there was a bear or two living in cabins in the mountains, and Jeff knew old Mr. Thatcher was a hawk shifter, and his daughter was as well. And over the generations of shifter presence here, the knowledge had gradually spread around the other families living in the area, so it was an open secret.